A Love Affair with Flash Heal

The age of the Discipline Priest has arrived (ie. 3.0).  The changes in old talents and the addition of new talents plus glyphs have changed the way people look at Flash Heal.  No longer is it considered slumming, but can new Discipline Priests break their love for Renew?

For along time Flash Heal was considered dirty.  It was mana inefficient and considered the sign of a bad priest, relegated to the dark alleys.  During those times you would use down-ranked Greater Heals and Renew to cover for a lot of the smaller damage that came out.

When I first switched to discipline I still put the talent points into Renew.  I was still trying to use it to cover small bits of damage like before.  I was sorely mistaken though and my lover Renew let me down.  Why though?

The HPS (heal per second) on an improved-glyphed Renew is quite good… it quite often never fulfills what you wanted it to do though.  You have those cheating COH Priests that to top off people (not to the extent it did prenerf) as well as WG (Druid: Wild Growth, AE heal).  You have holy paladins and other flash heal loving disc priests topping people off as well which ends up negating a lot of the effect of Renew.  I’m not saying its useless, there’s still instances it helps in such as when you need instant heals like Malygos Vortex and Heigan Safety-Dance.

You hear people talk a lot about synergy and using abilities that compliment other abilities.  Renew is anti-synergy with discipline spec, it feels like its spitting in your face sometimes.

-Renew cannot crit (which means no Divine Aegis procs).
-Renew does not stack Grace (which increases our heals on that target).
-Renew does not return mana via Rapture.
-Renew rarely ticks for the full amounts (see above paragraphs).

Flash Heal can critical hit, stacks Grace, returns mana via Rapture (and Divine Aegis’ procs) and most likely hits for full on a person.  Flash Heal can also be reduced down to your global cooldown (about 1 second) via an easily obtained amount of haste without having to worry about socketing for that stat at all.  Flash Heal continues to scale as your mana pool increases becoming cheaper and cheaper.  Flash Heal treats discipline with respect and showers us with gifts!

A bit of testing on mana return of Flash Heal.

Mana Pool: 22468
Grace Off
Base Renew (with 5/5 Mental Agility): 590
Base Flash Heal (glyphed): 625

3794 Flash 186 – Rapture (Flash Heal Cost: 439) Loves Me
Renew Heals  0 – Rapture (Renew Cost: 590)…… Loves Me Not
3559 Flash 172 – Rapture (Flash Heal Cost: 453) Loves Me
Renew Heals  0 – Rapture (Renew Cost: 590)…… Loves Me Not
3560 Flash 175 – Rapture (Flash Heal Cost: 450) Loves Me
Renew Heals  0 – Rapture (Renew Cost: 590)…… Loves Me Not
3767 Flash 185 – Rapture (Flash Heal Cost: 440) Loves Me

I think we know who loves me.

The effects of Rapture scales beautifully with both intellect and spell power which is a key component of using Flash Heal over Renew.

Using Renew in place of Flash Heal is the complete wrong thing to do.  If you are having trouble getting away from this philosphy of using Renew then toss it out, knock it off your toolbar and put Flash Heal in place of it.  That’s what helped me adjust.  I still have Renew on a toolbar that I can click in case I need it (see above paragraphs) but really… I never use it.

I hope this helps you adjust, move on, and see the difference between your ex and your new love, Flash Heal.